A little over a month until the music part of SXSW begins, I thought I would start to bring you this year’s previews of bands you should check out in between Mexican food meals and Shiner Bock binges. For those lucky enough to be heading to Austin for the 2010 festivities, you have more options than ever of checking out your favorite bands as well as discovering some new ones. Not meant as a definitive list (they’ll be plenty of those to go around elsewhere in the coming weeks), here are some of my favorite acts listed on the official schedule:
Starting off with the person responsible for one of my favorite albums thus far in 2010, Torontonian singer/songwriter Basia Bulat possesses such a unique voice that is guaranteed to bring in the masses wherever she performs on 6th St. With already over 600K myspace views and two beautiful LPs to her credit (both released on Rough Trade), I have to say I was a little late to the party when I picked up a copy of her latest Heart of My Own a couple of weeks back. All it took, however, was one run through and I instantly fell in love with her fluttery vocals and folk-pop melodies.
Some of my favorite tracks of Bulat is when she opts to use the autoharp instead of her typical acoustic guitar, like on the very poignant “Sparrow”. Choosing to abandon her backing band, the song’s near a cappella feel is the perfect recipe to highlight how powerful and extraordinary Bulat’s voice really is. Although it’s easy to get drowned out by the crowd noise at SXSW, I predict that after the first few measure at the mic, she’ll have a hypnotizing effect on the audience, silencing them in the process. You can check out the label-released mp3 “Gold Rush” below just to get a taste on how special seeing a Basia Bulat performance live would be:
